Chaneysville Incident (27 page)

She needed the keys because she had already got the telephone. They had installed it, in fact, that very morning, placing the receiver in her powder room. And that night, with the phone sitting there on the floor and the car sitting outside, doing the carpentry with a dogged competence, she had built a shelf with a small brass hook on the side and had secured the shelf to the wall of the powder room. She had placed the new telephone on the shelf, and she had hung the new car keys on the hook. The shelf, of course, was her idea of an altar to the memory of Moses Washington, who, despite the fact that he had put in indoor plumbing, and electric water heating, and an electric range, and a refrigerator, and even a wringer washer, had steadfastly, loudly, and, whenever she tried to insist, violently refused to install a telephone or buy a car.

I turned left and went quickly along Railroad Street, the mud falling from my shoes. I stumped along the pavement next to the deserted warehouses, reaching, in perhaps a quarter mile, the main north-south route. It was a federal highway, technically, but within the precincts of the Town it was called Richard Street, being named, as had most of the other streets in the old original Town, for a member of the family of William Penn.

That naming, no doubt, was a function of provincial sycophancy—certainly the Penn family had not had a whole lot to do with the Town. Certainly, too, they had not all been of much importance; I had never been able to find more than the sketchiest records of who Richard was and what, if anything, he had done. The street that bore his name was likewise of little importance; its function had once been to connect the trail that ran north to the western reaches of New York State with the road that General Braddock had cut to give access, along the Potomac, to the heartland of Virginia, and with the road to the west built by General Forbes, but in recent years a bypass had been built around the Town.

Forbes Road was not, in fact, the road built by Forbes, or even the route of it, but rather a sort of averaging out of several different wilderness and wagon roads that had been begun in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some abandoned for lack of interest or funds, or because of hostile Indians. The segment that connected the Town with Pittsburgh was commissioned in 1789 and was finished in time for Lee to march over it to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. But it wasn’t terribly important otherwise, and so I continued on Richard, crossing the Town’s main east-west street (which was named, of course, Penn Street), continuing on to the next corner. There Richard Street changed to the Springs Road and began its run to Maryland, after intersecting the second street named for a Penn.

John Penn, at least, was somebody. In fact, he was the lieutenant governor of the colony, and the last of the colony’s owners to have Say in its operations. He had been thrown out of office by the Revolution of 1776, and having determined to stay in the New World, he died in Philadelphia in 1795; not much of a record, but better than that of Richard.

On the corner of John and Richard streets stood the building that housed the local white Methodist Church. It was not the oldest Methodist organization in the County, by any means. A group of Methodists had come to Broad Top Township in 1787, no doubt to avail themselves of Pennsylvania’s offer of religious toleration. Their leader had been a physician, one Jeremiah Duvall, who was, evidently, a shrewd businessman. At one point, for example, he purchased the County’s first stableman—who, so local legend would have it, was once a celebrated savage chief—by trading for him with a steer. (The stableman, who eventually became free, married Mrs. Duvall’s maid, Black Rachel, but the union was not a happy one, and ended in divorce.) Even that was not the earliest record of Methodism, for three years before Duvall arrived, in 1784, a Methodist minister named Thomas Leakins traveled a circuit that included Maryland, Virginia, and Southampton Township, in the South County. Leakins presided over the building of a no longer used but still extant log church at the northern end of Beans Cove, and eventually held services in the town of Chaneysville, at the home that, before his death in 1820, belonged to Joseph Powell, Jr., great-grandson of Thomas. The Methodist organization in the Town, by contrast, dated back to only 1816, the lot on which its building stood only to 1818 (when it had been purchased from a Dr. John Anderson, for seventy-five cents), and the building itself to only 1827. I had, nevertheless, spent many an hour in the graveyard beside the church, examining gravestones, for it was said that, because a separate organization for nonwhites had not been established until about 1845, there were black people buried in there. But I had never found evidence of any.

I turned west on John. I crossed Thomas Street—Thomas Penn had managed the Colony for nine years and then gone back to England—and came to Juliana.

Who Juliana Penn had been and what she had done were total mysteries to me. I supposed that, given the tenor of the times and her female sex, she had not been allowed to be or do much of anything. The street named for her was, in contrast, one of the most important in the Town. At its southern end was the Heights, where the most prominent families of the Town lived in their old Georgian houses. The mayor lived on the Heights. The judges lived there. The most prominent lawyers lived there. Doctors had rarely been permitted to buy there, because the lumpen elements, visiting the consulting rooms, would have spoiled the Heights’ exclusivity, if only temporarily. In fact, it was something of a scandal when Lucian Maccabeus Scott had purchased his house. But they couldn’t do anything about that.

To the north, Juliana Street ran through the business district—if the Town had had a Main Street it would have been Juliana—and eventually ended at the gates of the Fort, which had been rebuilt, in a burst of local pride, during the County Bicentennial in 1958. The construction methods used were supposed to be identical to those employed two centuries earlier, and the local men who volunteered their labor had all grown beards to be in keeping with the historical spirit of the project. Ten years later, of course, anyone who wore a beard was liable to verbal abuse, and in more than one case, physical assault, by some of those latter-day frontiersmen. The irony of that, of course, escaped the locals.

Juliana Street stopped at the Fort, because beyond the Fort was the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River. From time to time there had been talk of building a bridge—there had, in fact, been a bridge there, a swinging footbridge, now in disrepair—but the motion had always failed, perhaps because if Juliana Street went across the river it would have connected perfectly with Vondersmith Avenue. Or perhaps the irony of that, too, escaped them, and it really was a lack of funds that prevented the building of the bridge.

In any case, I did not go down Juliana to the Fort and the river. I went only as far as the point where Juliana met Penn Street, the point called, in much provincial correspondence, the Great Square.

The order of the provincial government which, in 1766, had decreed the survey that laid out the Town called for the planning of a “Commodious Square in the most convenient place.” That was the Square. Until the mid-fifties it had been presided over by a granite soldier on a granite monument, who occupied the center of the intersection and created a traffic snarl. About the time of the Town’s Bicentennial they moved him to one corner and put in a traffic light, which made the intersection more of an intersection, but, to my mind, relegated the Square to something less than the planners had had in mind. Still, the Square was the political heart of the Town, and, in fact, of the County. On the southwest corner stood the County Courthouse, a red brick structure that dated back to 1829. When I was young I had always thought it was a church, primarily because it had a steeple-like clock tower. (The clock had been purchased for two hundred and fifty dollars in 1857.) Given the way politics was carried on in the County, my childish supposition was either precisely accurate or dead wrong, depending on what your opinion was of organized religion.

The northeast corner was the churchyard of the Episcopalian Church. The lots had been reserved by John Penn as the site of an edifice of the Church of England (despite their advocacy of religious toleration, the Penns knew which side of the altar the power was on), but no church was built there until after the Civil War. Something had been there, though; the postwar excavation unearthed the remains of several bodies, no one knows of whom.

The northwest corner held the Old Man on the Monument and, set back a ways, the Lutheran Church, a relatively new building, constructed in 1872 to replace the original structure, built in 1849. Before that time that corner had been the site of the County Courthouse and Jail. That building was erected in 1774 or ’75. It had always, it appears, proved inadequate as a courthouse (as, in fact, had the present one, where, until the mid-fifties, the lack of a sanitary accommodation for women had precluded female service on juries), but, by all accounts, it was more than adequate as a jail. One record, which dates back to 1884, declares that the structure was, for its incarceratory purposes, “pronounced, by those who saw the building years before its demolition, perfect.” It is recorded that the jail provided classed accommodations, varying according to the nature and severity of the crime. The debtors’ prison is described as having had a “grated window,” and there was a “cell for ordinary criminals.” The turns of phrase might be taken to mean that the cell was windowless, but if this was true, one must wonder at the marvel of colonial invention which would allow for even less light in the third—or perhaps, given that it was a jail, first-class accommodation, which is described as a “dark dungeon for convicts.” In any event, one suspects that the lightless “convicts” and “ordinary criminals” looked forward to coming out into the yard, even if they did have to look at the whipping post and the pillory. Despite its perfection, the jail was condemned in 1826. It was condemned again in 1833. Finally, in 1842, it was sold for ninety-three dollars and, presumably, razed. Now on the exact spot where it stood the old men sit on concrete benches, chewing tobacco and discussing the weather.

I sat with them awhile, not saying anything, just thinking about all that history, drowning my mind with the detail of that much of it to keep me from thinking about any more of it. But I knew the connections were there, even if I did not look at them.

Finally I rose, and when the courthouse clock bonged out half-past eleven and every businessman’s mind would be turning to lunch, I was climbing the wooden stairs that led to the second story of the block of offices that occupied the remaining corner of the Square, where, for over a hundred years, the Town’s most prominent lawyers had traditionally taken space. I put a scowl on my face and allowed my eyes to look just a little bit wild, and when I reached the door that bore the brass plaque saying
SCOTT & SCOTT
, I shoved it open so hard that it bounced off the wall.

The reception area was almost the same as it had been when my mother occupied it—a plain wooden table that was old enough to have been considered an antique, which held a black phone with several buttons and a small portable typewriter. The receptionist was nothing like my mother had been; she was small and young, with dishwater hair and a slightly reddened nose. I told her that Randall Scott wanted to see me.

She hesitated. “Do you have an appointment?”

I leaned across her desk, supporting myself on my fists, putting my face about three inches from hers. “I guess you didn’t hear me; I said Scott wanted to see me. I don’t want to see him. I don’t give a good God damn if I ever see him again. And I don’t have all day, either. So why don’t you stop asking dumb questions and tell the man I’m here.” She gaped at me—I could see her lip tremble—and I felt briefly sorry for her, briefly ashamed of myself. But I smiled at her anyway, and then I straightened up and took a few steps away and stared pointedly out the window at the old men sitting on the stone benches under the stony gaze of the old man on the monument.

“What—” she began.

I turned slowly and gave her a hard look.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said, and got up and came from behind the table, nearly stumbling over the phone cord in her haste. She went through the door to the inner offices. She closed it behind her.

I didn’t mind that; I could deduce what would happen when she tried to explain to Scott’s secretary that there was this…
person
outside wanting to see him, and then, since she didn’t know my name, trying to describe me without ever once using the word “black” or “Negro” or—as would probably be her impulse—“colored.” She would have to do it that way, for Scott’s secretary was one Yvette Stanton Washington, and white people who had the misfortune to find themselves in subordinate positions simply did not use that kind of terminology around her, not if they wanted to keep their hides intact. The lady had been trained in the South, and she was as deferential as she had to be around the upper crust, but she was sudden death on poor white trash. So I expected a slight delay, and then my mother charging out to deal with the problem of an…informally dressed peasant who had the audacity to demand audience without benefit of appointment.

But it was Scott who came, hustling through the doorway, hand extended, teeth bared in a broad smile. “John,” he said. “Good to see you.
Good
to see you. And good of you to come.” He managed to sound as if he meant it.

I had not seen him in years, not since he had come to Bill’s funeral, spouting patriotic platitudes like a Gatling gun and holding his prized daughter Mariam firmly by an oversexed elbow; he didn’t trust her around Bill, even if he was dead. (I didn’t blame him for that; I didn’t trust her around Bill, either.) Then he had been a sort of blocky, paunchy fellow in the first flush of prosperous middle age, dressed in subdued shades of polyester, the bulk that had made him a star fullback in high school and a second-string guard at Penn State (he had never had enough speed to get outside, with or without the ball) turning inexorably to firm suet. He had been the quintessential home boy made good, vice-president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce and treasurer of the Lions Club, a man with all his lines of development mapped out. He would become the president of the Junior Chamber. He would gradually take more and more responsibility for the business of the law firm. He would stand at the church door and shake hands as an official greeter. His suet would soften. The pinkness of his skin would change to redness, perhaps even floridity. He would change his sports from hunting and tennis to fishing and golf, trade in his Buick for a Continental, his double knits for flannel, and begin to winter in Florida.